Amazingly enough, they will win the law suit and the housing will become affordable for the well heeled. Watch and see.

I am not thrilled with the idea... We have successfully avoided the condo infestation for the most part; we dont need a project across the street.

Yeah, we could just chalk it all up to class bias, but there are some serious practical issues here, many of which have not been addressed.

Magnuson Park has 165 low income/formerly homeless people living there since 2000. Is Laurelhurst a ghetto now? Are the sick kids across the street at Children's Hospital getting assaulted? Are there needles all along Sand Point Way?

No, nobody notices except the people who had nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile Columbia City gets a one block monstrosity on Rainier Ave., four stories of single rooms for mentally ill, drug addicted homeless. Living six blocks away its not that big a deal to me, I just hope there are pedestrian barriers along Rainier or it will be carnage with all the speeders.

If they add a hundred units of housing, don't you think they can add another bus route? Or add a few more busses to the current route? Duh.

Same for grocery stores and other services. If there are a few hundred more people there that need it, then some enterprising business will add another grocery store or other low-priced shopping to meet the demand. Problem solved.

The sky is falling....

lighted ballfields at magnusson can suck it, though - we sued over that & got the number cut by a third. the discovery park suit is similarly an effort to extract concessions from the city/SHA.

Call me a NIMBY, but I rolled-the-dice with my life savings so that my daughter could go to Lawton School and so she wouldn't have to deal with the occasionally nightmarish conditions we experienced on Capitol Hill. (needles, vagrants, sexual predators, pit bulls, drunks, prostitutes, riots, tear gas, sirens, helicopters, scary people camping in our stairwell). That shit might sound exciting when you're 25 and single, but when your life revolves around housing, feeding, and clothing a 3 year old girl, you move to Magnolia and defend the quality of life. The city wants to add 300 housing units, but no new schools. In fact, the schools are full and talking about putting kids in "portables" (like Katrina survivors).

Despite the assumptions, Magnolia is not Mercer Island. The waterfront is wealthy, but the neighborhoods aren't. A lot of the neighbors are hanging on by their fingernails.

98199
Median Household Net Worth $216,303
Median Total Debts $252,094

I went to the City's planning meetings. The whole process was a sham perpetrated by a paid public relations firm. It was designed to manufacture consent for an outcome that was pre-ordained. There was zero tolerance for dissent. The question of whether the housing projects should be built was off the table. The only questions were about landscaping and traffic patterns.